You can try this out, just do a simple search like 'tell me a good place to go out with my girlfriend in my city?' and you will realize that Google can't answer this question, not because they don't know my city or my location, if you do the search from the phone or if you are signed on to Google it knows your location and your city. It's that Google doesn't understand the meaning of the question, however if I ask the same question from a friend it won't take a second for him come up with an answer, because my friend understands the meaning behind the question, not Google.
A language is complex, words have different meanings, and same word can act as a verb and a noun depending on how you place it, and a language can have millions of words, so processing these words one at a time (brute forcing them) is impossible or too cumbersome.
Also the summery of two different states of a word can be the same, as an example 'dog' and 'dogs' both words mean the same thing, one is singular and other one is plural. However for a machine dog and dogs are two different words (dog != dogs). So if we are to tell a machine these similarities of words one at a time it will be still impossible or too much energy consuming work.
In a summery language is difficult to understand because
- Language is ambiguous
- Language is productive
- Language is culturally specific
If we are to go through a vocabulary of words and find meanings and apply to a sentence it's brute forcing and will be highly ineffective.
It's a light bulb effect
But for some reason when we meet a word our mind just ticks and we get the meaning instantly or we understand a sentence as if there is a light bulb switching inside our brains, we don't go though a vocabulary of words it just happens. These days I am trying to learn German and using Duolingo to help me, and after going through the same German words few times the word and the meaning just sticks in my head. It's amazing how our brain process the data, I think there is a way that we are yet to understand how our brains process data. I don't know it because it is not taught at medical college, I don't know if anyone knows how our brains process data.
And although a computer can process data faster than a human, it is still not par with the understanding language, which means humans process language in a different way than computers, making it complex for machines to understand. I feel it's not that computers can't understand our language or our speech, its just that we don't know how to teach a machine to understand and process our language. And when we do lean how to teach them they will understand and process the language faster than humans.
Maybe emotions, past experiences may be playing a role in our light bulb effect in understanding the meaning, emotions and experiences are things that a computer doesn't have. May be if we can understand how our brains process language we might even be able to apply that to other computing problems and may even be able to speed up how our computers process data today.
I know the biological pathway in our brains that process language called the Wernicke's area, but what happens inside of that Wernicke's area is what we don't understand it's the place where all the magic happens.
It's fascinating to think how easy for us to understand a language and how we take it for granted everyday, but the difficulty to make a machine to understand a language or to teach how we understand a language.
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